Because "revisionists" often portray the soap allegations
as an attack on Germans generally, Nizkor wishes to make one thing clear
from the outset. We present information on Professor Spanner and the
Danzig soap experiment, not because we feel this isolated case is
relevant to the history of the Holocaust as a whole, nor because we
believe it is especially important, but because the revisionists we cite
have attempted to confuse the issue. They have conflated the Auschwitz
RIF rumor and the Danzig experiment into one "soap story" and
have presented statements about one or the other as though they referred
to both.

In order to eliminate this confusion, and to dissect this particular
technique of denial, it is necessary to explain the evidence regarding
the Danzig experiment in some detail.

Nizkor takes no position as to the reliability of this evidence, as
it is not clear to us whether there is consensus among historians on the
issue. The reader may make up his or her own mind. The important thing
is that the evidence does exist, and that the revisionist tracts we
shall examine ignore that evidence in an attempt to confuse the lay
reader.

One of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story
that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims.
[...] More important, this accusation was "proved" at
the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively
endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since.
[1]

This is not true. What does the Judgment of the IMT actually say?

After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some
instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of
the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap.
[2]
(Emphasis Nizkor's.)

Note that the IMT did not say that soap was made from human
remains -- on the contrary, they said that the Nazis tried to
make soap from human remains. One can attempt something without being
successful. The IMT also does not say that this attempt was widespread.
Weber deliberately misinterprets what the IMT said in an attempt to
discredit that body's judgments.

Weber's second claim:

...Holocaust historians have grudgingly conceded that the human soap
tale is a wartime propaganda lie.
[3]

Contrary to what Mr. Weber has said both here and above, the overwhelming majority of Holocaust historians have never believed that the Nazis mass produced human soap. He is trying to imply that people such as Yehuda Bauer
and Deborah Lipstadt have suddenly changed their minds on this
issue, especially because of what the revisionists have proved.

This is not the case, for Bauer and Lipstadt (and many others) never
believed it or mentioned it in their published histories of the
Holocaust. Even Weber's fellow revisionists Richard Harwood and
Ditlieb Felderer
contradict him by complaining that many Holocaust books do not mention
anything about human soap (see
below).

Weber's third claim:

Even British prisoners of war interned at
Auschwitz
in 1944 testified later about the wartime rumors that corpses of gassing
victims were being turned into soap there.
[4]

Actually, the Nuremberg documents contain the testimony of only
one British POW who mentions the soap rumor at
Auschwitz. This is what that POW, Douglas T. Frost, had to say:

The German civilians often threatened the inmates that they
would be gassed and made into soap. We were told that quite a few times
by the inmates and I personally heard the German civilians make those
threats many times. Also I heard the Germans joking among themselves
about the same thing. I didn't take it seriously at first but later I
wondered whether it might not be true after all. Though I have no
personal knowledge, I got the impression that the manufacture of
soap from inmates was being done at Auschwitz by rendering the fat from
the gassed bodies.
[5]
(Emphasis Nizkor's.)

As we shall later see, two British POWs testified to soap production
at the
Danzig Anatomic Institute,
not Auschwitz; whether Weber has confused these deliberately or
accidentally is impossible to know. Those testimonies were of activities
witnessed firsthand, indeed participated in -- not reports of rumors.

Note that Frost merely testifies to rumors, and that Weber
deliberately does not mention that Frost placed the blame for the rumors on the Germans who worked at Auschwitz.

In fact, we know that human soap was not made at Auschwitz.
In discussing soap taken from Auschwitz, Michael Berenbaum explained
that "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tested several
bars of soap reported to be composed of human fat but no such fat was
found."
[6]
The negative test result was confirmed also in a letter to the present
authors from Steve Friesen of the USHMM, 30 May 1995. But although human
soap was not actually made at Auschwitz, many people there apparently
believed it at the time, and German civilians there taunted inmates that
they would be made into soap, as Frost pointed out in his deposition.

Weber's fourth claim:

[Soviet prosecutor] Smirnov quoted at length from an affidavit by
Sigmund Mazur, an Institute employee, which was accepted as Nuremberg
exhibit USSR-197. It alleged that Dr. Rudolf Spanner, the head of the
Danzig Institute,
had ordered the production of soap from corpses in 1943.
[7]

This is correct: the most damning and vivid description of the Danzig
Anatomical Institute comes from Mazur, who worked there from January
1941 until the capture of Danzig. Note that Weber does not attempt to
discredit Mazur at all.

Actually, the "recipe," which is in German, does not
contain the word "human" in it, but it was a recipe for soap
made from fat typed on the letterhead of the Danzig Anatomical
Institute.

Weber's sixth claim:

Over the years, numerous supposedly reputable historians have
promoted the durable soap story. Journalist-historian William L.
Shirer, for example, repeated it in his best-selling work, The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
[9]

What, exactly, did Shirer say?

One Danzig firm, according to a document offered by the Russian
prosecution, constructed an electrically heated tank for making soap out
of human fat.
[10]

Notice that Shirer did not endorse, confirm, or "promote"
the soap allegations. Nor does he mention mass production of soap by a
factory. He merely states that there was one firm which made
one tank -- according to an IMT document, USSR-272 to be
precise. (The document was the written testimony of a British corporal
and POW, namely William Anderson Neely.)

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